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Broadening communication yet holding back: Teachers’ perceptions of their relationship with students in the SNS-era

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Abstract

Teacher-student relationship is vital for students’ academic, emotional and social development, as well as for teachers’ professional and personal development. This quantitative study examines teacher-student communication and relationship on Facebook among secondary school teachers (N = 180). We examined teachers’ attitudes towards: a) a policy that bans teacher-student Facebook connections; b) using Facebook for learning. Overall, teachers were interested in broadening communication channels with students, in order to empower learning and interpersonal relationship. However, teachers also maintain traditional teacher-student differentiation; they approve using Facebook for learning and disagree with a banning policy, but also prefer using a professional profile for interacting with their students. Data regarding teachers’ perceptions of relationship with their students and SNS-mediated communication present issues regarding means of communication, attitudes towards the policy of banning SNS, standpoints on using Facebook for learning, and preferred profile for communicating with students. We discuss these issues in light of academic, pedagogical, and inter-personal implications.

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Notes

  1. Facebook Stats, http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info [retrieved June 2017].

  2. The term “homeroom” is explained in Section 7.3.2. Relationship between Ang’s Axes and Homeroom Teaching.

  3. SimilarWeb’s statistics for 31.3.2013 reveals that Facebook was the most popular site in Israel, as was reported in https://www.isoc.org.il/sts-data/10837 [Hebrew]; TIM survey about Internet use in Israel, published on 14.1.2013, reported that Facebook was the second most popular site in Israel (after Google), as was reported in http://b.walla.co.il/item/2606671 [Hebrew].

  4. This commonly-used term is defined by Oxford Dictionaries as “A person who tries to be like someone else or to fit in with a particular group of people” (Wannabe 2017).

  5. Teaching Forces in the Education System for the Years 1991–2013 (A Collection of Statistical Findings) [in Hebrew], Central Bureau of Statistics, published in November 2013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Levinsky College of Education, 15 Shoshana Persitz St., P.O. Box 48130, 61481, Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Alona Forkosh-Baruch

  2. School of Education, Tel Aviv University, P.O. Box 39040, 6997801, Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Arnon Hershkovitz

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  1. Alona Forkosh-Baruch
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  2. Arnon Hershkovitz
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Correspondence to Arnon Hershkovitz.

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Forkosh-Baruch, A., Hershkovitz, A. Broadening communication yet holding back: Teachers’ perceptions of their relationship with students in the SNS-era. Educ Inf Technol 23, 725–740 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-017-9632-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-017-9632-z

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